


Things made for sea air

by SharpestRose



Series: Things made for sea air [1]
Category: Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-01
Updated: 2011-07-01
Packaged: 2017-10-20 22:00:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/217511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SharpestRose/pseuds/SharpestRose
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An AU. An orphaned girl, a compass that doesn't point north, a boy whose father was a pirate, a cursed treasure, and Captain Jack.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things made for sea air

It's three weeks since her father died and Elizabeth is entirely lost. The new governor and his family will arrive within the next few days, and she will have to leave the only home she's known for near a decade. She knows she should have moved by now, gone back to England or at least found some gormless nobleman to marry here. Instead, she has wandered about in a daze and offered up blasphemous prayers.

"Will, Will," she mutters in her sleep and murmurs when awake. She has not seen him for eight years. Sometimes, when things have been especially dreary for a long stretch of days and weeks, she thinks she must have dreamed him in a delirium of boredom. Something to pique her interest before the tedium killed her.

But she has the medallion in the secret compartment of her top drawer. It proves the integrity of her memory.

***

It had not been a week after her arrival in Port Royal, while she was attending another gala luncheon to welcome her and her father. She was bored and uncomfortable, unused to the heat and all too acquainted with idle party chit-chat. Then she'd noticed a boy in a too-large jacket lingering near the table of drinks, eyeing off the unopened bottles with a calculating gaze.

He hadn't seen her watching, too busy avoiding the notice of the adults around them. She crept near, reaching out to grab his arm only when he moved to slip a bottle of brandy into his coat pocket. He started in surprise and fright, like a cornered animal.

"You're a _pirate_!" she'd whispered in excitement, seeing the brand-mark on his wrist where her own hand had pushed the cuff high.

"Keep your voice down!" the boy said, panicked. "Please!"

"I find pirates fascinating," she went on, fingertips still grazing the scarred skin. "What are you doing here? What's your name?"

"I'm not doing anything. Keep your voice down, I beg you. And stop saying that word!"

"What word?" she asked, her eyes widening as she realised. "Oh. You mean..." Her voice dropped to a soft whisper as she moved close to his ear. "Pirate?"

"Yes, that'd be it," he hissed. "Stop. Saying. It."

"All right, all right. Are you here to sack and pillage the port?"

The boy looked at her as if she were mad.

"No," he said slowly. "I'm taking the brandy."

"Oh," she said. "Aren't you a bit young for a pirate?"

"Stop saying it or I'll box your stupid ears! And aren't you a bit young to be at a party designed to marry the governor off?"

She hoped her expression was suitably appalled. "He's my _father_."

"Well, _my_ father wants a drink, so toddle off to your dolls and leave me alone."

"Fine." She dropped his arm and turned to storm off, too furious to think of telling anyone that a miniature pirate was plundering the punch ingredients.

"Wait," the boy said, catching her arm and spinning her back to face him. "I'm sorry, I suppose it's not your fault that girls are more trouble than they're worth. Here."

He pressed something into her hand, heavy and warmed from his pocket. A medallion without a chain, bearing the design of a skull.

"Elizabeth!" her father called from the centre of a pack of polite society nearby.

"Will," the boy whispered. "My name's Will Turner."

He was gone before she could answer.

***

Elizabeth has a pocket watch which doesn't work, which once belonged to her father. It stopped ticking time along correctly on the voyage over from England, and her father put it aside and left it for her to find and claim.

"Why don't you just get it repaired?" she'd asked him, playing with the hinge and wrapping the chain around her fingers as she spoke.

"No point," he'd answered. "Some things are made to stand sea air, and some aren't, and that's life."

"I think I'm made for sea air," that long-ago Elizabeth mused. "May I keep this?"

"Yes, yes, keep it," answered her father, gazing at her with worry. As if he was all too sure she was right about her true place on the ocean.

Since her father died, she's carried the watch at all times. She clasps it now as she wishes silently to the night air.

She has purchased an outfit of slightly ragged men's clothes, and a nondescript coat to go over the top. With her hair under a hat, she hopes she'll pass well enough to travel unnoticed. After the act of leaving, she doesn't know what comes next. Perhaps someday she'll find Will again.

Elizabeth redoubles her fervent wishing, praying for something miraculous to happen. And then... the creak of hinges, the rustle as the curtains shift and part, and a whisper.

"Miss Swann? Elizabeth?"

"Will? she asks, and the woman she'd been until three weeks ago would have fainted. When he replies, she can hear the grin he must be wearing.

"You remember me? I've never for a moment forgotten... we were only children then, but..." His voice slows, becomes serious. "You are in danger, Miss Elizabeth. What I am about to ask you is of vital importance. Do you still have that medallion I gave you?"

"What?" she asks, even as she rises to collect it from its hiding place. "Yes, yes, of course. What's happening?"

He barks a short laugh. "You would not believe me if I told you. As I trusted you with my name once, I ask you to trust me now."

Despite all reason, she does. Perhaps more than he intended with his words.

"Take me with you," she says.

"What?"

"I'm all packed, I was going to run away tonight anyway. Please, Will." _I don't have anyone but you left_ she thinks, but doesn't say.

"Yes." Will sounds surprised but happy. "Of course it's yes."

They run down to where a rowboat is waiting, manned by a young woman with fierce eyes and short answers to Will's questions about her wait for him. The ship they row out to reach is majestic and intimidating in the dark, and for a moment Elizabeth doubts the wisdom of her decision. Then Will speaks softly to her, and her worries lessen somewhat.

"If any of the men call me captain, pay no attention. They do that to impress girls, whenever one's brought aboard by one of the men. But I don't care if you think me captain or cabin boy, it doesn't matter what you think of me at all, really, just so long as you're safe..." He trails off, realising he has been babbling, and Elizabeth wonders if pirates can blush.

"Who is the captain, then?" she asks as they're pulled up to the deck by a rope.

"That'd be me, love," says a cheerful voice with the texture of honey and rum. "Will, lad, did you bring any provisions of a liquid consistency with you?"

"Not this time, Jack," Will answers as he and Elizabeth stand up beside the captain. "Wasn't a chance."

"Ah, well." Jack shrugs philosophically. "No harm in asking. Welcome, lass, to the good ship... well, the slightly-bad-but-really-actually-has-a-heart-of-gold ship, anyway... _Ariel_. I am Captain Jack Sparrow. You've already met young William, and the sociable lady climbing up just now is AnaMaria. This," he gestures to a bewhiskered and salt-cured looking man nearby. "Is Mr Gibbs, and -"

"Why, we've met!" Elizabeth says in surprise.

"Aye," Mr Gibbs says gruffly, and Elizabeth remembers his superstitions of women aboard on voyages.

"And... as I was saying prior to interruption -" Jack gives a glare and Elizabeth feels abashed until she realises the pirate captain is having fun at her. "That's Cotton, Duncan, Tearlach, and that chap on the prow is Loadstone James."

"Come on, I'll show you where you can sleep," Will says, and Elizabeth's glad her days of polite pleased-to-meet-yous are at least temporarily over.

"Will..." Her voice is hesitant as they climb below deck. "I don't know why I'm doing this. I never do things like this."

"Perhaps that's the reason," Will says, half-turning to give her a smile with the words. "Here, you'll have this room to yourself. Get some rest."

It's not until just before she falls asleep that Elizabeth realises none of the pirates were surprised to see her.

***

Will still has nightmares about being unable to swim. He's like a fish at it now, wriggling and quick and deft. But that's not how his nightmares go, they squirm back into his history and unlock a late afternoon when he was ten years old.

Barbossa put the irons on himself, the manacles so heavy Will's back curved under the weight. That was the only time in the mutiny that there were murmurs in the rabble, and even then nobody moved to voice dissent.

"I'll send a bill for the items I'm loaning," Barbossa said with a cruel smirk. "Four sets of chain and cuffs, a pistol with one shot - for the whelp, you three can rot with your senses awake to the decay for all I care. I'm letting you keep your boots and hats as well, so I'd say I'm being overly charitable in the circumstances."

Will couldn't stop the tremble in his shoulders and jaw, teeth chattering in fear. He didn't know even the simplest of strokes, and with the iron binding his hands to gravity it barely mattered anyway.

"Don't worry," his father said quietly in an even, steely voice. "We'll keep your head above water, lad."

Will nodded, not trusting himself to speak.

Even with his dad's promise fresh in his ears, Will couldn't help but panic as the cold closed over his head. This wasn't the shallow world of the beach side, the drift and rise of waves. This was down and down like falling, dark and pressing and eternal.

Thrashing, terrified out of his head, Will didn't realise that his father and Jack and James were all pulling him up to the surface. His mouth was full of salty water, his lungs opening to cough up but instead sucking more choking dark in.

Then light and hands dragging him to shore and he was coughing and spluttering and vomiting. He barely moved for the next three days, too horrified at the prospect of his own mortality to do more than eat and drink what was offered to him and lie there listening to the others talk.

"Rum-runners'll be here by week's end. Look, Bill, is the kiddie all right? He won't even say his own name when I ask if he knows it."

"He'll be find once we're off this island, I reckon. His sense isn't gone. Jesus, Jack, why'd you have to tell Barbossa the location of the treasure?"

"I didn't think he'd bloody mutiny, did I? 's not what you expect from a confidante."

"Which is why you don't take lying dogs as confidantes!"

"Jack," James cut into the sniping match. "If the location of the treasure has been known and passed on for many years, why is Barbossa so sure it hasn't been plundered?"

"Legend says it's cursed gold and any who takes it out of greed will la la etc and so forth. Never had much belief in that business, have to say."

Will, unable to imagine a curse worse than the depths of the ocean, ceased listening after that, and when his memory hits this point he wakes, breathless and sweat soaked, his spine crawling with remembered dread.

***

Elizabeth wakes, like Will, to fear. What seemed clever and romantic and almost surreal by the light of the moon seems ridiculously stupid now.

A knock on the door interrupts her growing doubt. It's Will, and for the first time in nearly a decade Elizabeth gets a good look at him. He's leaner, darker, than that long-ago boy, but his eyes are as Elizabeth remembers. There's an air of steadiness in him that makes him seem as old as any on board, though he can't have many more years under his belt than she does. Elizabeth's read enough books about pirates to know they grow up younger than most other people, but it's still strange to see. It's as if Will's of a race utterly unlike the stock Elizabeth grew from.

"Hello," Will says, not quite looking at her.

"Hello," she says back. It's unsettling, to have the being you've thought about so long there with you and nothing to say to them. They both seem to realise this at the same moment, and laugh. It's easy to love impossibility and daydreams, after all, and they can forgive each other for a short adjustment period when the unattainable has fallen in their laps.

"Your captain seems quite the character." Elizabeth shifts so there is room on the bed for Will to sit. She wonders whose room she's commandeered to have such a spacious bed.

Will nods, but doesn't say anything in reply. Elizabeth holds back the urge to roll her eyes. Shy pirates, of all the ridiculous things...

"Tell me about him," she prompts. It's as good a place to start as any.

"About Jack?" Will asks, somewhat surprised. Elizabeth nods.

"Or about AnaMaria, or Loadstone James, or about the ship, or the medallion, or anything. It's poor form for a man who climbs into a lady's bedroom in the middle of the night to be tongue-tied the next morning, Will Turner."

He smiles at that. It's a rogue's grin, cheeky and world-wise and dangerous all at once, and Elizabeth decides that it wasn't so entirely stupid as she'd thought earlier to be running off in the dark with pirates.

"We'll start in order, then, if I'm to answer so many questions..."

***

Jack will probably never truly consider Will a grown man. Jack is fierce when cornered, singleminded when angry. Jack sometimes, when very drunk, tells the story of a girl he loved in Singapore - she and the baby both died in a dirty room without a midwife. Jack has fourteen of his own teeth in his mouth. Jack is smarter than he lets on, but not as smart as he believes himself to be. Jack has treated Will as his own blood since Bill died. Jack lost the _Black Pearl_ , the only thing he'll admit to caring about, in a mutiny. Jack is waiting for the day it will be his once more.

***

Not entirely through fault of his own, Jack is in debt one ship to AnaMaria. He's promised her the _Ariel_ when the _Pearl_ is recovered, and she's biding her time for that day as sure as he is. She is a better sailor than she is a conversationalist, but figures one more than makes up for the other. She keeps a gold comb tucked in one boot, but none know the story of it save for her.

***

Bill was the one who first called James Loadstone, perhaps so that his own nickname of Bootstrap would seem less curious.

"Because you're always read to lead up the right direction," was in explanation. The same reason Jack gives for why he lists James' position in the crew as Conscience, a light tease at his unwavering morality. Little did they know, when the jokes began, that this was the original goal and reason behind James' choice to be a pirate.

Horace Quincy Norrington had always intended for his second-born son to become a Naval officer. This projected life-plan suited the young James Philip Norrington just fine, because the ocean was more interesting than any other option anyway.

Horace had been a second son himself, once upon a time, but the elder brother (James Vyvyan, for whom the boy was named) had been killed at sea by pirates.

"Damned bloody pirates," Horace would say as if he had not benefited considerably from his brother's misfortune. "You become a commodore, James, and you see that pirates get what they deserve. You hear me, boy? Got to be stopped."

And that's probably exactly what would have been James' fate - to be Commodore Norrington, Pirate Hunter - if not for a girl named Penelope Pinkerton-Smythe.

Penelope Pinkerton-Smythe (James has never and can never think of her by anything but her full name) had very prominent teeth and a reedy laugh and was the youngest daughter of James' mother's second cousin. Penelope Pinkerton-Smythe happened to be riding beside James on an interminable country drive. Penelope Pinkerton-Smythe bred dogs as a hobby, and talked about breeding dogs whenever she wasn't actually doing it.

"If there's an unruly strain, the best thing to do is bring in a solid, reliable dog to temper the others. With really wild animals you can't beat the wildness out, they only learn by demonstration."

The simplicity of the logic was too obvious a metaphorical sign to ignore, as far as James could see. It's pure speculation to suggest that perhaps being a perpetually dutiful son was becoming tiresome even before that fateful piece of advice.

So James Philip Norrington ran away from home shortly after his seventeenth birthday, and set out to rid the sea of villainy by joining a buccaneer crew.

James often wishes Bill was still alive, because now Jack has that compass which never points north. Good men who are pirates have no need for a loadstone, James wants to tell Bill. Their route is in another direction.

James wishes Bill was alive for more than a chance to tell this joke, of course. James misses Bill very much.

James joined the crew of the _Pearl_ when he was twenty, only five years younger than the charismatic Captain Jack, and sharp-tongued and cheerful Bootstrap Bill had offered a friendly ear to them both. Nobody else would have ever spoken to the captain the way Bill always did, and Jack respected him for that as much as anything else.

Jack liked James for similar reasons, because James would draw Jack aside mid-raid and say things like 'let that young girl keep her gold locket, and make her give you her finest boots in its place. Scarlett will be as pleased with one as the other as payment for companionship, and this girl would mourn the locket but will forget the boots'.

Jack always acted like James was an amusing novelty for voicing such suggestions, but Bill and James both noted that the advice was always taken.

It was towards the end of the second year of James' time on the _Pearl_ when two things happened of significance.

The first was that Bill's wife, a seldom-visited but generally forgiving women of Irish heritage named Nan, turned consumptive. It took many months before the letter carrying this news caught up with Bill, and when it did he kept it to himself. James found it by chance, looking for blank paper one evening, and confronted Bill with it. (Pirates, even notoriously ethical ones, tend to view mail as being in the public domain as far as reading rights go.)

They argued, and Jack overheard and came to see what was going on, as he was quite fond of a good argument, and once he'd picked up the gist of the backstory he'd suggested that Bill might want to go visit his extremely put-upon spouse and at least let her go to her rest knowing her child would be cared for.

"What, and raise the boy a pirate?" Bill said.

"Bit of pot-apparently-appalled-by-the-kettle there, mate," Jack replied, and six weeks later young William Turner joined the crew of the _Black Pearl_.

Three weeks after this, the second thing happened, and that second thing was mutiny.

The three men had been friends before, but it was only after loyalty was chosen over life expectancy that they become close as brothers. And now Bill's gone, and James and Jack think Will is a man his father would be proud of. But that doesn't make the lad a substitute for the man who gave a friendly ear to a young Captain, and an even younger Conscience, once upon a time.

***

The _Ariel_ is 68 feet long on deck and 20 feet wide at the waterline. She can go nearly eleven knots when Jack has done something that particularly needs running away from. Six square sails, five fore-and-aft sails, and two miles of standing rig.

The room Elizabeth slept in is usually inhabited by Jack and James, who are charging Will an exorbitant hourly rate in exchange for vacating said room and teasing him with merciless affection as interest. They're bedding down in one of the rarely-used aft cabin rooms, too used now to privacy to give it up.

Jack is lying on his back, head pillowed by his hands as he contemplates something amusing enough to make him smile. James, beside him, is dozing. James lies face down, the bare skin of his back above the blanket showing the blurred blue lines of a design on one shoulder blade. A compass without names for the directions. His hair, habitually tied back off his face, lies in dark half-curls against the sun-browned skin.

"This hair is a horrifying embarrassment for me, you know," Jack says, pulling on one of the longer locks with an attention-seeking tug. James grunts and swats Jack's hand away. "I'm serious, mate, you are the least stylish pirate I have had the displeasure of observing. And considering the extremely fetching cast the moonlight lends to the features of our former comrades now, you have beaten out some stiff competition for the title."

"Mmph," James shifts so he's facing Jack, who is now propped up on one elbow and still playing with James' hair. "What's wrong with my hair, then?"

"You've got now -" Jack waves his hand around as a substitute for proper description. "No intent. Your hair ignores you, and you ignore it. You might as well have none at all for all you care."

"Then you'd have nothing to critique about me, though," James answers as one of his hands creeps up to find to the buttons still residing on Jack's shirt and flick them open. Jack arches into the touch, limber as an eel.

"Well, I'd critique the fact you'd be bloody bald, for starters. And you could do with a new tattoo or two. And your -"

The litany is cut off as James presses a kiss against Jack's mouth.

"You talk too much, Captain. Will all due respect," James says.

***

Will cultivated a talent for picking pockets even before he joined his father in piracy, and in the year after the mutiny he turned the talent to near an art. At the _Bride_ , the tavern of choice for his father and James and Jack, Will was proud to be able to buy them a round. At eleven, Will himself was still forced to be content with lemonade, but felt sure it would be sooner rather than later that he'd wear the staff down and have a cup of rum in front of him like the others.

Sounds of violence were practically ambient background noise in the _Bride_ , so it wasn't so much the sound of a wallop to the head as the words that went with it which caught Will's attention.

" _I'm_ tellin' the story!"

Pintel and Ragetti had left an impression in the short time Will had been aboard the _Pearl_. Competitiveness, life-threatening levels of stupidity, and inability to stay sober after the smallest amounts of drink were easy traits to remember.

Their coin purses were encouragingly heavy, and Will was as pleased about having a chance for a small amount of revenge as he was about the money.

His father, however, looked worried at the loot.

"Shouldn't touch them, Will. Those would be some of the cursed coins, I'd say."

Jack, despite continuing to announce regularly that he didn't think the curse was likely to be true, didn't touch the gold either.

Will didn't believe in ghost stories and magic tricks, and so he didn't hesitate to use two of the coins to buy drinks. James, who _did_ believe in the curse, was just as ready to spend the pickpocketed treasure.

"They threw a child overboard in irons. Let them be cursed until judgment day, if that's what distributing the gold to the corners of the world will do."

So some of the twenty-five pieces were spent in Tortuga. Some went to bribing the agents of the East India Trading Company a few months later, an adventure which left the four of them branded and in somewhat of a bad mood.

One of the coins was given to a little girl who found pirates fascinating.

Three more were lost due to a tear in James' pocket during a daring escape from an angry mob, but the other treasures gained in that escapade made up for them.

The last piece, Will threw down a well. He didn't tell the others what his wish was as he did it, but all knew it was probably involving that Swann girl in some way or another.

Now rumor and superstition says the crew of the _Pearl_ have reclaimed all but one of the accursed coins. The gold calls and they follow it, and Will didn't even realise he was telling Jack to head for Port Royal until he'd already done it. The _Black Pearl_ would not be drawn to Elizabeth, would never know the last piece had been hers for so long, if Will had any say in it. But then she wanted to come along, and how could he have said no to having her near?

Fog is starting to gather around the _Ariel_ , and the air's getting colder.

***

These are not the stories Will tells Elizabeth, though some of the same incidents feature. He makes her laugh, and gasp with shock, and both of them end up with the opinion that memories aren't nearly so bewitching as possibilities.

"Oh," Will says, fumbling in his pocket. "Here, put some of this on. It'll stop your eyelids being burned by reflections on the water." He draws out a small tub of oily-looking eyepaint, the same sort Jack had smeared around his eyes when Elizabeth met him. Elizabeth hesitates, then nods.

"All right. Can you help me with it? There aren't any mirrors here."

The paint feels greasy on her skin, and the touch of Will's fingertips makes her start in surprise.

"Sorry," he says. "Pirate's hands. I know they're rough."

"Yes," Elizabeth answers. "But I don't mind. Go on."

When her eyes are ringed with dark, Elizabeth feels like her old self has fluttered away like the paper hats she used to fold as a child. She isn't sorry, to lose this girl she once was. Perhaps this new person who wears ragged boy's clothes and lines her eyes black will not feel the death of her father like a knife every day. Maybe she will have adventures. Will might not mind if she kissed him.

It soon becomes apparent that he doesn't mind at all, and that's that.

***

"We're making better time than them, we'll hit the Isla de Muerte least two hours ahead of them tonight," Jack says, watching the hazy sky as if it's telling him secrets.

"But why go there?" asks Elizabeth. "Why do what they want?"

"It's like this." Jack uses his body language to speak almost as much as he uses words, and his posture and movement now say 'this is a complete arse of a plan but it's the best we've got'. "They'll try to kill us whether the curse is broken or not, but we can't properly fight them unless it is. So our best chance of survival is to break the curse, confront them when they catch up, and hope that even mutinous blackguards who've not tasted contentment for ten years have the sense to surrender and give their ship to us rather than risk being killed. Way I heard it, they've all split their blood on the coins already, so all's we have to do is drop that lovely medallion into the big box and we're set."

"You really think they'll do that? Surrender?" Elizabeth's voice is incredulous.

"Well, no, not really," Jack admits with a grin. "Nice thought though, innit?"

"What about the legend of what happens if an innocent man turns his face away from the gold without taking it?" AnaMaria cuts in. Elizabeth smiles timidly in greeting and gets a stony glare for her trouble. Offended, Elizabeth holds her chin high and glares back, at which point AnaMaria gives her an unexpected wide smile.

"The legend that the gold grants wishes, you mean?" James says, wiping his hands on a rag as he comes to join the conversation. He's missing the top knuckle off one finger, Elizabeth sees, and she can't help but wince at the sight of the scarred skin. "I would not have thought any of us were candidates for the term 'innocent', AnaMaria. I doubt such a legend is true, anyway. It would not have served the interests of those who made the offering to include such a condition, so why would they bother?"

"Are we having a secret meeting, then?" Will asks on approach. Elizabeth's heart flutters at the sight of him and she becomes suspicious that she might have an awful lot of silly little girl left in her after all.

"Discussing out upcoming brush with a certain legendary ship of the damned," Jack tells Will. "Feeling ready, lad?"

"I've been ready a long time, Jack," Will answers, and his face looks old and hard.

***

Actually, despite the mood of pessimism and steely resolve on the _Ariel_ beforehand, the plan goes off surprisingly well. The cursed crew of the _Pearl_ have won too many battles by simple virtue of not being able to be killed, and even the stupidest in the ranks are not so stupid as to trade being alive for a ship. They surrender quickly and James and AnaMaria round them up with only a little needless violence.

It's nearly the easiest reclamation in the history of the sail.

And then Barbossa grabs Elizabeth and holds a cutlass to her throat, and drags her past the momentarily frozen crew of the _Ariel_ back to the chest of Aztec coins. It's only a few seconds between the start and finish of the surprise maneuver, just enough time for Elizabeth to think _No! I will not let this be the end of me!_ , and when Barbossa swoops one hand down to grab a coin Elizabeth reaches her own hand out and clutches one herself. He needed a hostage for those vital seconds, but Elizabeth has no illusions about the longterm prospects of the role now that Barbossa is cursed again. An instant later and it would have been too late, there's a small cut in her neck where he began to draw the blade across.

"Clever little strumpet," Barbossa says.

"Dimwitted pirate," Elizabeth shoot back as Will shouts her name and throws a sword to her.

Elizabeth has, unsurprisingly, never held a sword in her life. But losing all the constants she knew, and then deciding to run away when presented with the opportunity, has left her as a person capable of adapting quickly. The essential principle of sword fighting seems to be to use your own sword to stop your opponent's from dividing you into sections. There's some other idea about fighting back and trying to cut your opponent, too, but as this is Elizabeth's first lesson she's willing to take things one concept at a time.

There are various shouts and thuds as the rest of the recently uncursed crew decide to follow their captain's example.

"Feisty lass you've found yourself, Will," Elizabeth hears Jack say somewhere to the left of her, the words separated by the sounds of clashing blades. She dodges another thrust from Barbossa's sword with a yelp of surprise and fear. Stumbling to regain her footing, Elizabeth steps into a shaft of moonlight.

"... bit skinny for my tastes, though," Jack finishes. Elizabeth has no time to pause and look at the curious beauty of her naked bones in the blue-silver light, and jumps away from another attack from Barbossa with a grunt of exasperation.

"Instead of making bad jokes, you could come help me!" she shouts.

"Bit busy right now!" James answers for the crew in general, though Elizabeth can't see where he is. Elizabeth swears as Barbossa cuts her arms, the wound welling sluggishly.

"You can't kill me any more than I can kill you," she points out through clenched teeth.

"Don't need to kill you, just need to get your coin and a bit o' that blood there and you'll be doomed as your shipmates."

The blood is running down Elizabeth's arm and dripping from her fingertips now, slicking the hilt of the sword. She can feel the throb of the cut, but it doesn't hurt. She switches the sword to her other hand and then realises this is what Barbossa wanted, for the medallion is now smeared with her blood. She shoves it in the pocket of her waistcoat, determined not to lose the fight through naivety.

Time to learn how to fight back, then.

Elizabeth stabs out wildly, the blows easily dodged by Barbossa but driving him steadily back nonetheless. Will jumps up beside her, flashing a lightning-quick grin before lending his blade to the fray. Then, as if thinking better of it, he shoves Elizabeth away and steps back himself, and pulls out his pistol.

"Would that be the one shot I gave your dad to put through your head on that little island?" Barbossa asks. Will shakes his head and fires at Barbossa's hand.

"No, of course not. But I find that any gun works just as well for revenge, in the end."

Barbossa drops the coin and Elizabeth darts between them to grab it before Barbossa can stop her. Even if you're dead, it must be slightly uncomfortable to have your fingers blown away.

They don't kill Barbossa, though. Will wanted to for a long time, but now that the chance is here he finds it doesn't matter to him one way or the other. All told, two thirds of the _Pearl_ 's crew survive, herded into another cave and left with a heavy guard as some of the _Ariel_ 's men (and women) go back to the treasure horde.

" _Knew_ we'd have trouble," James says. Jack claps him on the back.

"You're sayin' it like you'd be happier with things another way, mate."

"Shut up, all of you, I'm too tired for your prattle," says AnaMaria.

"Hear hear," Elizabeth puts in, exhausted. "Come on, I need to put my own coin back in the chest."

She drops the sticky gold in atop the others, listening to the clatter and feeling sensation flood back through her limbs. Her arm starts to hurt like fire, but she ignores it.

"Do you think it's true? About granting wishes?" Will asks.

"Anything in particular you're yearning for?" James retorts with a smirk. Will smiles and shakes his head, and they push the lid back into place.

***

"I can repair that, you know," offers James as he sits beside Elizabeth on the deck of the _Pearl_. Her wrist is bandaged and the pain is a little less, and she's winding the chain of her father's pocket watch around her fingers. Jack is wandering from end to end to end of the ship, smiling and humming to himself in utter contentment. Elizabeth thinks Will might be avoiding company, this is the first time he's been on this ship since his father's death and it must feel like revisiting an old life.

"No," she answers James, shaking her head and closing the clasp on the watch's glass face. "Some things aren't made for sea air, and some are, and you can't turn one into the other. That's life."

"Hmm," James nods. "Are you tired of piracy yet, Elizabeth? We can put you ashore at any port you care for."

Elizabeth pretends to consider her options.

"You know, Loadstone James, I once told my father I was one of those things made for sea air, and I believe I was right."

The horizon stretches across the future, and Elizabeth fancies she can hear it calling.

 

 


End file.
